History continued to repeat itself in Bengal even as principal Opposition party BJP on Tuesday suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the ruling Trinamool Congress conceding all the four Assembly seats that went to polls on October 30 by-elections.
The saffron outfit not only lost all the four Assembly seats --- including the two it had won in April-May State polls --- to the TMC but it also forfeited deposits in all but one seat of Shantipur in Nadia district. Even here the party lost to the Trinamool by a whopping margin of about 64,000 votes.
TMC’s Braja Kishor Goswami won Shantipur defeating his nearest BJP rival Niranjan Das. Shantipur was earlier won by BJP’s Jagannath Sarkar an MP who later chose to retain his parliamentary seat. Up in North Bengal the BJP’s Ashok Mondal lost the Dinhata seat to TMC’s Udayan Guha by a huge margin of 1.64 lakh votes. Dinhata is the home turf of Union Home Minister of State Nisith Pramanik (and Cooch Behar MP) who had contested from the seat in April-May elections defeating Guha by 53 votes before choosing to retain his Parliamentary seat. “How the Home Minister performed is proved by the fact that his party trailed the TMC by 95 votes from his home booth,” said Cooch Behar TMC leader and former Minister RN Ghosh.
Near to Kolkata the TMC candidate and State Minister Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay won the Khardaha seat in North 24 Parganas by a huge margin of 93,800 votes. He defeated BJP’s Joy Saha.
Further south near the Sunderbans TMC’s Subrata Mondal won the Gosaba Assembly seat defeating BJP’s Palash Rana by a huge margin of 1.97 lakh votes.
Even as the TMC continued to shatter records of winning margins --- leading the opposition to level charges of rigging --- percentage of votes showed TMC getting an absurd 84 percent vote in Dinhata, 87 percent in Gosaba, 74 percent in Khardaha and 55 percent in Shantipur. Compared to the ruling party the BJP polled 11 percent vote in Dinhata, 13 percent in Gosaba, 10 percent in Khardaha and 23 percent in Shantipur.
Over all percentage of polling saw the TMC getting 75 percent votes leaving the BJP with just about 14 per cent. The Left Front clambered up improving upon its earlier percentage of secured votes by getting 7 percent votes. In the State polls the TMC had secured 48 percent votes while the BJP got 38 percent and the Left had got about 5.5 per cent votes.
While Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay attributed his party’s victory to the “magic of Mamata Banerjee” the Bengal Chief Minister congratulating the people and the Trinamool Congress for its “stupendous victory” tweeted “This victory is people's victory, as it shows how Bengal will always choose development and unity over propaganda and hate politics.
With people's blessings, we promise to continue taking Bengal to greater heights!”
A visibly listless BJP leadership however blamed “rampant rigging and cold terror and threats” for their loss.
“What can we say … if the situation in which we are now continues no party will be able to win in Bengal … because where the voters are threatened by the night not to venture out during the polls and where their votes are cast by the cadres you cannot do anything but sit as silent spectators,” a dejected BJP national vice president Dilip Ghosh said.
However when asked whether the BJP’s graph would continue to tumble like this he said “in Lok Sabha elections we will again win and win 25 seats.”